320 Pages
    by Routledge

    320 Pages
    by Routledge

    Gender as Soft Assembly weaves together insights from different disciplinary domains to open up new vistas of clinical understanding of what it means to inhabit, to perform, and to be, gendered.  Opposing the traditional notion of development as the linear unfolding of predictable stages, Adrienne Harris argues that children become gendered in multiply configured contexts.  And she proffers new developmental models to capture the fluid, constructed, and creative experiences of becoming and being gendered.  According to Harris, these models, and the images to which they give rise, articulate not only with contemporary relational psychoanalysis but also with recent research into the origins of mentalization and symbolization.

    In urging us to think of gender as co-constructed in a variety of relational contexts, Harris enlarges her psychoanalytic sensibility with the insights of attachment theory, linguistics, queer theory, and feminist criticism.  Nor is she inattentive to the impact of history and culture on gender meanings.  Special consideration is given to chaos theory, which Harris positions at the cutting edge of developmental psychology and uses to generate new perspectives and new images for comprehending and working clinically with gender.  

    Introduction. Part I: Relational Developmental Theory. Multiple Selves, Multiple Codes. Timelines and Temporalities. Chaos Theory as a Theory of Development. Part II: Gender as Soft Assembly. Gender Narratives in Psychoanalysis. Tomboys' Stories. Gender as a Strange Attractor: Gender's Multidimensionality. Genders Emerge in Contexts. Part III: Developmental Theory and Research. Developmental Applications of Nonlinear Dynamic Systems Theory: Learning How to Mean. Dynamic Skills Theory: Relational Mourning as Shared Labor.

    Biography

    Adrienne Harris, Ph.D., is Clinical Associate Professor at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, and an Associate Editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and Studies in Gender and Sexuality

    "In this dazzling tour de force, Adrienne Harris reminds us why she is a leading relational thinker and theorist of gender, even as she goes one enormous step further in presenting an original theory of development worthy of the complexity and nonlinearity of psychic life.  Harris's range is breathtaking, as she moves the reader beyond perspectives on development that tended to stages and linear paths to a theory that incorporates recent findings in psychoanalysis along with developmental psychology research bearing on language, intentionality, experiences of self and other, temporality, and cognitive modalities.  And throughout we find a profoundly humane, brave, and gifted analyst at work."

    - Nancy J. Chodorow, Ph.D., San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute

    "This is a landmark study of the development of mind and subjectivity, the culmination of 30 years of interdisciplinary research, teaching, and psychoanalytic practice. With an unfailingly keen eye for the ideological dimensions of theory and the hidden undercurrents of values and power, Harris constructs a sophisticated relational approach to development that gives weight to the intrapsychic and the interpersonal, to mind and body, to social and historical forces.  If, as Harris observes, psychoanalysis is now at 'the edge of chaos,' with the field poised to change and readjust in unpredictable but patterned ways, then Gender as Soft Assembly will itself be a significant catalyst shaping this reorganization."

    - Lewis Aron, Ph.D., Director, NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis

    "In Gender as Soft Assembly Adrienne Harris has created a brilliant synthetic work in which she challenges us to reconceptualize development through the lens of relational psychoanalysis, context specificity, and nonlinear dynamic systems theory. Drawing on chaos theory as a vehicle for apprehending development along multiple, sometimes intersecting, time lines, she provides a capacious framework for understanding the multiple, complex ways that gender and symbolization are constructed in our deepest attachment relationships. This outstanding and scholarly tour de force, which integrates gender, complexity theory, developmental psycholinguistics, relational psychoanalysis, and attachment theory, will surely become a transformative text of our times."

    - Susan Coates, Ph.D., Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research

    "Psychoanalytic theory has been in dire need of thinkers who can bring to bear, on the essentially complex psychoanalytic models of mind, the theories of complexity already extant in the worlds of philosophy and science.  Adrienne Harris has produced an elegant and wide-ranging discussion bringing together and integrating psychoanalytic theory and practice, non-linear dynamic systems theories, developmental psychology, and gender theory.  She goes one more; she shows with many evocative clinical vignettes how these models really do have things to teach us about what happens in the analytic process.  Ranging from the nuts and bolts of practice to an engaging and cutting-edge account of complex models of mind, this book will be of interest to practitioners and theoreticians alike."

    - David Olds, M.D., The Psychoanalytic Connection